Sam Altman Testifies in Elon Musk Lawsuit Against OpenAI

Sam Altman testified on Tuesday in a trial pitting Elon Musk against OpenAI that Elon Musk was obsessed with trying to control the artificial intelligence company and wanted long-term control of it. Altman said after OpenAI’s Dota 2 win, discussions for a for-profit arm started in earnest.

He testified that Elon Musk felt very strongly that if OpenAI formed a for-profit he needed to have total control over it initially.

Altman added that Elon Musk only trusted himself to make non-obvious decisions that were going to turn out to be correct. The OpenAI CEO testified that he was uncomfortable with Elon Musk’s insistence on control because OpenAI existed so no one person would control AGI.

When he asked Elon Musk about succession plans for OpenAI, Musk replied that in the event of his death control should pass to his children.

Sam Altman sent a 2017 email to Shivon Zilis stating he was worried about control and that no one person should have control of the world’s first AGI. Altman testified that he read a vague, lightweight threat in texts from Sam Teller indicating Musk would build AI inside Tesla with or without Altman, Brockman, and Sutskever.

Sam Teller sent texts to Shivon Zilis at 12:40 AM on February 4th, 2018 stating he didn’t love OpenAI continuing without Elon and would rather disable it by recruiting the leaders.

Elon Musk stopped his quarterly donations to OpenAI. After that, OpenAI was operating on a shoestring with an extremely short runway of cash. OpenAI had other donors, none of whom have sued it or joined Musk’s suit.

Alameda Research, owned by Sam Bankman-Fried, was a donor to OpenAI. Elon Musk resigned from the OpenAI board. Altman testified that Elon Musk had demotivated some of OpenAI’s key researchers and done huge damage for a long time to the culture of the organization.